Nothing Changes
by ariadne3
Summary: Spike takes Dawn on a trip to his old home town and gets nostalgic about the past. Spoilers: set post- The Gift


Nothing Changes

Nothing Changes

It was almost a month after Buffy's death and the despair hadn't lifted. In all his years as a vampire Spike had never approached anything resembling remorse. It simply wasn't something they were capable of. But his regret for not saving Buffy, for not protecting Dawn was a constant taunting pain, sharp as a stake in the heart only not as merciful.

Dawn was insane with grief after the funeral. Every reminder of Buffy reduced her to tears. The Scooby Gang took turns looking after her. It gave them something to do. It was Spike's turn on the night he walked into the house and found her on the floor weeping uncontrollably over Buffy's casually discarded hairbrush. What he saw in her tear scarred eyes was a terrifying blankness. 

The Scoobies didn't approve but Spike's idea was for him to take her far away. Somewhere where there was no reminders of her loss. He thought that a continent and an ocean were far enough. 

London was stupefying that summer. Not like the crisp, Pacific sunshine of Sunnydale. It was humid and muggy, the sky brimming with suppressed rain. The heat reverberated off the old stone buildings and rose in shimmering waves from the pavements. The people were irritable and cranky and the population swelled by the summer tourists and Wimbledon fans. The hotel prices were jacked up accordingly. They found a rooms in a cheap Earl's Court hotel and the manager looked at Dawn with lewd interest.

"Look mate, I'm not running a knocking shop. And she looks underage too." 

Spike grabbed him by the hair, smacked his head down on the reception desk and snatched the room key. He stormed up the stairs, trying to ignore the inevitable pain. Dawn followed him silently as the manger grabbed at his bloodied nose and howled.

"Home sweet home" Spike said, sitting down on a bed. He looked round the dingy room decorated in ugly 70s furniture and lit a cigarette. "Over priced, dirty, too big, rude people. Forget why I ever left." 

Dawn kneeled on the window seat looking out at the red brick street, bright under the yellow streetlights. "Can we go to the Tower tomorrow?" she said quietly.

"You can go, kitten. They don't keep vamp hours. And bring me back something from the butchers, I'm famished."

As he had on the flight over, Spike wondered why he was here. What he really wanted to do was to stock up on some Rheus negative, Jack Daniels and The Clash and drive as far and fast as he could into the endless Californian desert. To get lost forever in somewhere as dry and empty as himself. He wasn't very keen on baby sitting a teenager in his old hometown. So what was he doing it for?

Partially keep his promise to Buffy. And partially Dawn reminded him of Buffy. Bitty-Buffy he called her and that was more true than he'd realised. To have Dawn alive meant a part of Buffy was still living. But Spike couldn't deny a large part of him truly wished Dawn had died instead of Buffy. And yet he felt different things when she looked at him.

Spike was used to seeing reactions to himself from people. They were mostly variations on terror, which was always enjoyable. And approval from Dru, her crazy eyes shinning as he did something particularly terrible and Angelus-like. He'd tried so hard to live up to her warped ideal. For Buffy it'd been the opposite. He'd tried to win her over by some quick move and witty comment: to prove that a vampire could be worthy of love. 

Dawn had never asked anything of Spike, apart from his company. No one had ever liked him for himself, either pre or post mortem. When Dawn looked at him with her big dark eyes she seemed to see right through all his posturing- right into him. He was all she had now and he knew it. Oh, to be wanted! It was a pleasure that curled darkly through Spike's veins like a fresh intake of blood. Her need was intoxicating. It was a mirror that that Spike could preen himself before. 

Spike wasn't happy about letting her roam the city alone. He knew intimately what Big Bads lurked in the underground stations, not just the demonic kind either. But what else could he do?

He dozed intermittently and uncomfortably during the long summer days. His dreams interrupted by replays of the struggle with Glory, in all of them he did something different and better and Buffy lived. It was the saddest of songs and he couldn't seem to stop playing it over and over again. Spike woke every few hours bathed in sweat and waited for Dawn to return.

When Dawn came back in the late afternoon she'd bring him the souvenirs from the places she'd seen. They'd watch Eastenders on the TV: Spike doing exaggerated comic versions of the Cockney accents. Dawn had started keeping a journal again. She sat cross-legged on her bed, sticking postcards in it and writing quietly. 

"Is there anything in it about me?" Spike asked. Dawn just smiled. It was first time she'd smiled in a long time. 

"Spike," she said, "I couldn't get you anything. That butchers you mentioned is a Starbucks now."

"Figures." muttered Spike.

At night the city was theirs though. They prowled the noisy, gaudy streets of Covent Garden, pretentious posers wearing dark glasses at midnight. One night Spike lifted a couple of cheap plastic sunglasses from the rack outside a Leicester Square shop. It struck him as a melancholy joke. Sunglasses? Of all the things a vampire could steal. But Dawn had solemnly taken the pair he'd handed her. "Now we can look like proper tourists," she'd said. 

But the shades served a purpose- hiding Dawn's tears and Spike's exhaustion. Inviolable, under their hidden gazes they surveyed the free street show: the acrobats and fire-eaters, the foreign tourists, the drunken locals, the homeless people, the constant smell of sweat and warm blood and alcohol. Nothing changes, thought Spike, only the drinks get more expensive. In a way it was like his best years with Drusilla. Spike had a brief pleasant flashback of him and Dru feeding on a group of comatose students on the spot where Dawn now stood watching a juggler. 

Spike scowled as he suddenly recalled the rest of that night, when they rendezvoused with Angel back at their place. In the beginning he'd often listen outside Drusilla's room like a child, listening to Angelus take her again and again, not having either the nerve to walk in or to leave. That night Angelus came out and caught Spike lurking in the shadows. "She's all yours, Will" he smirked and Spike had truly wanted to kill him. Instead he walked in and slammed the door on him, wishing they could leave for good and find their own way in the world.

Since he'd returned to London Spike was thinking a lot about the old days. It was easy for vampires to obsess about the past. In 120 years Spike had experienced places and events that humans could only read about in books. Yet sometimes he wondered if he'd ever really left this place, where his life had left him. When he closed his eyes the years would fall away, and there he was: still stuck in London 1880, as though he'd never left it. He wondered if he was the only vampire to open his eyes and find the world not at all the way he expected it to be. 

He shook the thought away and looked towards the east where the mid-summer dawn was already breaking. "Time to go, love. Beddy-byes. I don't want to get a crispy suntan."

They walked back silently to their digs. Spike watched his non-reflection in a new glass and steel building. He couldn't get over how much London had changed. In places it was just like LA. But then back in the old days the city was always changing too. New buildings built up and knocked down. The coming of the trams and tube and then cars and then airports. So it always was. Nothing changes. Only everything does.

That morning Spike stood by the window listening to Dawn's sleep-deep breathing. Bathed in blue half-light she looked older, more like Buffy. She'd matured so much in a few months. Dawn would get over the loss of Buffy and she'd get over Spike. She'd find some nice, breathing boyfriend. He could see her now at 21, 25, looking at him the way any woman looks back on her high school crush. That bright adoration would change to embarrassment that this was what she found attractive when she was 14. And relief too, that she'd moved on and joined the grown ups world. He'd still be stuck, frozen at this point- still grieving for Buffy, still mourning everything that he'd lost. Eternity hit him like a brick wall.

It's pain kills you in the end, pain and loss and seeing too many changes. When you become a vampire you think you can stop the clock, instead you are tied to it forever. 

Dawn would learn to live and die in this world- but he never could. 

The light was already pushing through the gap into the room. He could hear the sounds of the city waking up, the delivery vans, late night stragglers, and street sweepers. London was getting ready for another day. The clock kept on ticking but how easy would it be to stop it for him, to open the curtains. It would be painful but probably less painful than immortality in the long run. 

The thing Spike always wondered is where vampires go when they die. Hell? Well, he was certain there'll always be a place for him there.

A sob from Dawn's bed brought him back. She was on her stomach, crying into the pillow. He sat down on the edge of her bed. The tears suddenly embarrassed him. He felt dull and old, unsure what do. He pulled back her hair, seeing the vein pulsing in her delicate neck. He had an instinctive thought of how easily those bird-like bones would break in his hands and pushed it to the back of his mind. 

"It's ok kid." The words sounded lame even as he said them. They hung heavily in the air inadequate and useless. 

"Not it's not." The pillow muffled her voice. "It's all my fault. Why did she have to die? I hate myself."

"I could help you," Spike said. 

"I don't want you to help me" she sobbed. 

"No, he said quietly, "but maybe you can help me." 

Dawn lifted her head from the pillow and looked at him directly for the first time. He realised that Dawn might be alone but then she was all he had left too. And she knew it too.

"Maybe we'll leave here tomorrow." Spike felt like he was holding his breath until he realised he didn't breath. "Would you like to go to France, kid? Paris is really something."

"Is it?" 

"Nah, of course not. But its something different ain't it. Change'll be good. For both of us."

"Okay then?" 

She tried to smile and couldn't but she'd stopped crying. Spike awkwardly wiped away her tears with the edge of his shirt sleeves. He'd be better of without this. And she'd certainly be better off without a vampire as a guardian. But then again she doesn't need to see him go up in flames. Not yet anyway.

"Okay, Dawn."

He'd promised Buffy he'd protect Dawn until the end of the world. And the world kept on callously turning. But they were still there. She wouldn't need him one day but that wasn't yet. 

Maybe this human could anchor him to the world, if only for a short while. Maybe one day he would stop the clock for good, when he'd seen too many changes. But that day wasn't yet.


End file.
